While the solid state drive market might seem like it’s sprawling, Seagate politely disagrees… for now. The world’s largest hard drive maker is planning to get into the SSD game in mid-2009, when there will be more possibilities to make money.

Seagate’s CEO Bill Watkins recently said in an interview, “The problem is you can't make money out of it [mobile flash memory]… I don't need to get into a market I can't make money out of. I can get into that market any time - all I have to do is show up with a product and price it. The problem is, I can't show up with a product that's any better or significantly better than what they're getting now so I have to match their price.” And, according to Watkins both Micron and Samsung (big names in the current SSD industry) are selling at a loss. “To do the product is not a big deal but to make money at it - it's important to us.”

Aside from mentioning Seagate’s will to do well financially in the flash market, some plans were finally outlined by Watkins as to just how they’ll break onto the scene. They plan to do so with a “combo” drive. The Seagate drive will feature both single layer chips and multilayer chips of flash memory. The combination of these two technologies will offset the pros and cons of each, providing both a reliable and reasonably priced drive.

Seagate earlier this year launched the industry's frist 1.5TB desktop drive, which remains the largest capacity drive available on the market. To accomplish the feat without sacrificing performance, Seagate packed just four platters inside with an areal density of 375GB per platter resulting in what the company claims is a sustained data rate of 120 MB/s. It all sounds great on paper, but could there be something wrong with the high capacity drive?

A jaunt over to Seagate's support forum reveals an 11+ page thread of users complaining that their 1.5TB drives are exhibiting random freezes. Most of the complaints stem from users running a RAID array in Ubuntu, but mixed in are a handful of users claiming the same behavior being displayed in single-drive setups in other operating systems, including Max OS X and Vista.

According to the various comments, support inquiries have ranged from "Unfortunately, we do not support Linux" and "Again, these drives are not meant to be used in a RAID environment so we are not going to be working towards a solution for this environment," to "This is an issue we are currently working on. I know it's a hassle for now, but we're working on it as quickly as we can. As soon as we have information available we'll let you know." Other users claim they're being told a limitation error in Vista might be the culprit and they should try reducing the partition size to 1TB.

Any Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB owners experiencing similar symptoms? Hit the jump and let us know if you're having any issues with your drive.

SSDs are the hottest trend in storage, but how long will an SSD last? Right now,there's no industry standard for longevity or reliability. However, Cnet reports that Seagate and JEDEC are working together to establish a standards-based method for determining those factors.

Seagate isn't alone in working with JEDEC, the standards body responsible for standards in the solid-state industry. Earlier this year, X-bit Labs reported that JEDEC's JC-64.8 committee, which is responsible for developing SSD standards for embedded and removable storage, is being co-chaired by Micron Technologies and Seagate.

Micron brings its experience in memory technologies, while Seagate brings its experience in drive reliability to the endeavor. As Cnet reports:

Seagate says it can tap into the decades of expertise it has in error correction. "Some of the skills we've picked up along the way, to deal with imperfect media, has applicability to dealing with imperfect media on NAND."

Seagate's own SSDs won't hit the market until 2009, but hopefully its work with JEDEC to set standards for reliability will help make all SSDs more reliable.

So, what do you think? Will Seagate's presence on the JEDEC committee responsible for SSD standards make this latecomer to SSDs the one to trust when product finally hits the street? Or, are you ready to use SSDs right now? Join us after the jump for your chance to sound off.

Noticeably late to the solid state storage (SSD) party is Seagate, who earlier said it would offer its first SSDs sometime in 2008. As the year is quickly coming to an end, the company has now pushed its entry into 2009.

"Our history is based on rotating magnetic media," Seagate's senior manager of market development Rich Vignes told Cnet. "But as solid-state comes online, we're embracing this new media type."

Not everyone would agree that Seagate is "embracing" the increasingly popular storage medium. While several companies have made a push to get SSDs into the mainstream market, Seagate's late entry will focus solely on the enterprise market with consumer drivers to be sold "later." So far the company has not yet announced announced plans to manufacturer NAND flash memory by itself like many of it competitors are doing. Instead, Seagate has kept the focus of its flash business to hybrid (flash/HDD) hard drives.

The Iomega Zip drive once was synonymous with consumer-friendly data backup. Seagate aims to change that with a huge makeover of its FreeAgent line of external hard disks and a companion advertising campaign designed to tug at the heartstrings of today's increasingly media-consuming families.

Announced Monday, Seagate's new FreeAgent models include the portable FreeAgent|Go and the desktop FreeAgent|Desk (both available in separate editions for Windows PCs and Macs) as well as the high-performance desktop FreeAgent|XTreme for Windows PCs. The goal of the new line of products is to "Save, Share. Simplify."

To learn more about how Seagate plans to make its slogan come true, join us after the jump.

Consumer electronics giant Samsung also happens to be the world’s premier NAND Flash memory manufacturer. It now aims to further strengthen its position by acquiring flash memory maker SanDisk, if reports in the Korean media are to be trusted. The rationale behind such a move is that an acquisition will not only bolster Samsung’s current flash memory production capacity but also save the company about $350 million annually – the amount Samsung pays SanDisk in royalties. SanDisk has been navigating through some rough financial weather lately, but still is coveted by couple of big companies. Of course, rumors of Seagate making a bid for the company have also been around. A possible acquisition would handover a considerable advantage to Seagate in the SSD market. SanDisk certainly seems to have a few takers.

Seagate hasn’t had to hard-sell its products directly to consumers hitherto, as manufacturers and disk drive resellers account for most of its sales. But all that will change in December with the airing of Seagate’s maiden commercial aimed at generic consumers.

Brian Dexheimer, the company’s president for consumer solutions, views the upcoming ad campaign as both an experiment and opportunity. The ad campaign will proclaim the indispensability of Seagate drives and show no gender bias – its Seagate not Gillette; there will be a separate set of ads for both men and women. Seagate’s ad budget has seen a substantial increase of 40% this year.

Marketing research firm iSuppli has reported on the status of the hard drive industry, and from the sounds of it, we just can’t get enough storage.In the first quarter of 2008, hard drive vendors shipped over 137 million units in a seemingly futile attempt to satiate consumer’s appetites for inexpensive storage. Despite the 21 percent increase in sales over the same period last year, many HDD vendors such as Seagate continue to struggle. iSuppli speculates that lower prices and a disproportionate demand for lower margin desktop drives are to blame. This is a trend that is likely to continue as SSD’s continue to plummet in price and become the storage medium of choice for mobile devices mainly due to its durability. Despite the challenges conventional hard drive makers face in the mobile market, iSuppli is forecasting strong demand in the second quarter with shipments estimated to be up by as much as 16 percent over 2007. Seagate continues to lead the pack with profits of $363 million, followed by Western Digital at $298 million, and Hitachi at $65 million. This is excellent news specifically for Hitachi who has been struggling to pull itself out of the red. So has our insatiable appetite for digital media made mass storage devices recession proof?

Put a feather in Seagate's cap. The storage titan has sprinted to the finish line and scored an exclusive: the world's first 1.5-terabyte hard drive. The 7,200rpm drive uses a mere four platters to achieve its huge capacity point -- that's 375GB per platter of areal density. Beefy.

Seagate is claming a sustained data rate of 120MB/s for its drive, which might very well be enough to place this little guy above Samsung's 333GB-per-platter HD103UJ drive. Other than that, the bulging Barracuda seems similar to every other high-capacity drive on the market: expect a 3Gb/s SATA interface and a typical 32MB of cache. Check out the full release below!

Maxtor, Seagate's home storage brand, is set to centralize home network storage with its new Central Axis network drive. In a world of other network attached storage devices, what makes it different than the competition?

Read on to discover how Central Axis is designed to "play nice" with today's diverse network configurations, and how much it will cost to add it to your home network.